However, you conflate "businesses" with "entities that pay only some minimal poll tax". It turns out that progressive tax does not preclude complex society. Corporate tax does not kill business on touch. All you've argued for is the existence of the Laffer Curve.

Commercial activity predates currency, and is omnipresent across every tax system that has ever been tried. Where money, there trade. Where trade, there value-add. Or at the very least, combing the beach for pretty shells.

There are tribes without the concept of personal property or money, that make things and build value. No tax can extinguish human creativity.

I'm cagey about secondary effects, but I'm cautiously optimistic about debasing the trait of self-enrichment. I see no reason to take on faith that people acting out of self-actualisation would build a lesser technology. You know you're on a site full of nerds, right?

The existence of the internet protocols is a case in point.

Conversely, I prefer a world without facebook and robocalls.